HN user
The Chinese government is doing all this and more. So is Iran, No Ko, Russia, to the greatest extent they can.
Credibility score:
US government agencies: 0.52
UK, Aus, Canada govts: 0.6
Chinese government: 0.01
“What we learned from the 2016 election is that all the bad things we were told NSA was doing, Facebook was actually the one doing them.”
There are three kinds of groups collecting data on individuals today:
- Democratic governments
- Autocratic governments
- Surveillance-capitalism private firms
Of those three groups, only democratic countries have rules and laws in place to protect individuals. NSA has strict rules about data collection on US citizens; autocratic countries and Facebook do not. NSA has caught a few employees looking at data they should not have; those employees were disciplined.
I’d much rather have agencies of a democratic government doing this than anyone else. I’m a US citizen, but I trust the U.K., Canada, etc to do this right.